Octopath Traveler (Nintendo Switch 2018)

yeah you can freely swap, the only limiting factor is you don't get your job points back so if you waste those on a job you end up not using you might have to go grind some up

i think i used thief on haanit mostly. nothing's particularly synergistic with her

I think since Ophilia is my protagonist I’ll go ahead and make her the apothecary, that way she can also deal with status ailments & it doesn’t matter much that she sucks at physical attacks.

H’aanit’s going to end up with warrior secondary, I think.

If I make Olberic a dancer will he announce THE PEACOCK STRUT with the same sultry, yet stentorian assertiveness as Primrose?

Not positive but his outfit is the same as Primrose’s

His fate is sealed

anybody else sing "Rufus, the Left-hand Man" to the tune of "Roland the Thompson Gunner" or just me

I feel like I already won the game when I introduced the textiles guy to the idea of making pants. The rest is adventure saga gravy for historians to ponder, while they wear variations on the theme of durable, yet fashionable pants.

ciderpress otm (as usual) that the miniature biographies of NPCs is the best part, but the travel banter between party members is all but tied for first, and I don't want to make a choice

There's so much nuance in these stories that got overlooked. Well, and there's a lot of stuff that's not nuanced at all!

As far as I can tell, this entire continent is a collection of failed states where hacks and charlatans and bandits do as they please, while the working folk die in poverty and the rich sit idle. Let's also put a nail on it - everyone who is rich got their via inheritance or theft. On top of that, you have a network of disgusting sexual abusers and pimps, highly politically connected, some Big Pharma, and I swear I had to fight one of the Koch brothers last night over the land rights to some shithole mine.

Who wrote this game? How is there not a MAGA chud outbreak of death threats against the people behind it? I'm only 42 hours in. Please tell me there's 100 hours more.

(violently incapacitating the Theranos-wannabe was almost as fun as stabbing Primrose's pimp to death, but, as above, nothing is going to match the latter tbf)

I should probably point out that I got on the computer to revive this thread for none of the reasons mentioned above. I just wanted to share that I LOL'D IRL at:
1. Cyrus apparently has the brains AND the looks - he should make some money
2. Ophilia, per travel banter, is not interested in either, and wow Cyrus sucks at talking to girls
3. omg how many "Cyrus is murderously awkward" story segments can there be? Can it be in the hundreds?

Cyrus should just go all in on terrible hair and cargo pants, like his new pal Alfyn. Then the girls will just go "ugh" and he can focus on his puzzles.

OK well it turns out that whole story was soaked in so much blood only an academic could come out the other side with even a modicum of sanity. Forget pimps and snake oil pushers, we're on to ritual killers with deliberately fucked up modus operandi.

Also, I think I figured out how the apothecary class is useful, sort of?

Alfyn’s concoct unique can be super clutch with the right ingredients at the right time. My partner loves poisoning people

it's good for getting breaks - though I haven't mixed every combination yet, it seems like he's the only character able to hit any given elemental vulnerability, on top of inflicting status debuffs

yeah concoct basically does anything, in small amounts and if you have the right ingredients. the actual apothecary skill package is not that great though Amputate is the highest damage single target attack in any of the base classes iirc

I feel like I already won the game when I introduced the textiles guy to the idea of making pants.

I met that guy today in the dance hall, en route to finding the dancer shrine and knocking out some side quests. I’m getting all the secondary jobs and finishing off the last of the Chapter 2s today.

I like where H’aanit’s story is going.

I have no idea what secondary job to give to Therion. Hunter?

Hunter’s pretty good to get the weapon diversity for Therion, and leghold trap is something to do with him on a dead turn

he will be lego trapping so much

OK here's the final roster before I get those extra special jobs I'm not supposed to know about yet:

Ophelia, the Holy Apothecary, batman
Cyrus, the Scholar of Trading
Tressa, the Merchant of Thievery
Olberic, the Warrior of the Dance
Primrose, the Twerking Cleric
Alfyn, a Pharmacist and a Scholar
Therion, the Thief of Hunting
H'aanit, the Huntress Of Fighting

I would be interested to know what other folks ended up with (MINUS THE SECRET JOBS THAT COME LATER)

scholar tressa was my favorite one, the merchant passive that halves magic costs is a big deal there and the merchant defensive / regen skills are good on casters

i had alfyn as a warrior since the apothecary class is statted as more of a tank healer than a caster healer

also tressa's black mage outfit is stylish was another factor

was gonna say Alfyn looks rather striking in his cosplay

given that Ophelia is my protagonist, I'm comfortable with my not-entirely-optimal support skills arrangement - there's a ton of fun in this game that's buried in all the different ways you can min/max the PCs.

I also like the cognitive dissonance involved in Thief Tressa and Scholar Alfyn

yeah there arent really any bad combos other than mixing the pure physical and pure caster ones

Even with that, it's a grinder, and there are some equipment sets that I can see making those actually viable, albeit not so convenient

I’ve made Olberic a cleric and I’m gonna keep trying to make that work

just as long as you understand that as soon as you're out of the picture he's going to move to Central America and become a bartender and barely even talk to his family anymore

Dancin' Olberic with Eye for an Eye equipped is lots of fun when a foe uses a multiple strike technique on him. The first time it happened I thought the game had hiccuped

obv any character with that skill does the same thing but when it's Olberic it def feels like cheating, e.g. they shoot him with 4 arrows for like 120 damage tops and then it's just murder time

I dunno 'bout you fellas but if I were the king of the lizardmen I'd feel pretty fucking embarrassed gettin' cut to shreds by a nun, two dancers, a druggist and some rando amateur travelin' pastry chef

It's rare, in my experience, that RPG level-up events coincide in cinematic fashion with RPG narrative events, so it seems necessary to memorialize what just happened:

- Olberic got enough JP in his 3rd chapter dungeon to get the Warrior's Divine Skill
- I decided to let him build BP while stacking physical attack buffs (if you played this game without providing Olberic the opportunity to pursue his dreams as a dancer, you missed out)
- thanks to Eye for an Eye, he got the Break right on time
- Brand's Thunder, Erhardt eats it

I love this game.

I finished all the chapters 2 and I have Cyrus at 35, a couple people at 30, the rest 24-27 or so. Probably just going to do miscellaneous grinding and shopping for another session or two. Most of the sidequests are too enigmatic to really be able to just sit down and try to solve some so that’s not really gonna help much.

My partner managed to kill a Cait in one lucky fight where she had a surprise round a while ago, some of her dudes leveled up like twice.

i played this game for almost 60 hours and never managed to kill one of those

might grab this in the EU e-shop sale

can you turn off random encounters?

no

sounds like it’s not that much of an issue because the battle system is so good

Yeah this is a game primarily about hanging out with the battle system. I've found that you don't necessarily have to spend extra time leveling up your guys to beat bosses, as long as you don't have a mental block around burning through recovery items. (I did before I started playing this game lol)

reading this thread has given me much relief as i am about 11 hours in, have 7/8 characters through chapter 1, and was genuinely concerned that none of these 8 people were going to ever interact with each other/would just endlessly travel from solo plot to solo plot, never speaking, never explaining why they're together, just an archipelago of every-man's-an-islands forever taking a knee while anything significant happens in their walkmates' lives

there's some tales skit style conversations in chapter 2 onwards but outside of those it's as you describe

ah nuts. well at least there's the little skits, better than nothing

this is out on steam in june, surprising since i figured nintendo had partially funded it but i guess not

I'm finally playing this, have finished all the first chapters & just Therion's chapter 2. Do I need to grind all my characters to the same level more or less? It seems like it because Therion, at only level 15, sucked in the chapter 2 battles. And the other ones not in my primary party thus far suck too. I don't really just want to grind the underleveled characters in non story parts if I don't have to, but do I have to?

and if I do have to grind random encounters, is there some reliable place to do so? I was in the desert yesterday boringly grindingly away, but I can't keep doing that, it will drive me batty.

you do have to grind a bit because it doesn't have bench exp yeah. definitely the worst part of the game. you can kind of circumvent it by having 3 'main' party members carry a rotating 4th underleveled one through their stories. the postgame superboss is the only thing where you need to grind all 8 chars up to high level and that's totally optional if you're not a completionist, i checked out before it.

I did the rotating 4th under leveled one on therion chapter 2 & I beat the boss but it took an hour!

did you find the secondary job shrines yet? chapter 2 bosses and onward are tuned expecting your chars to have those

I just found the mage one! near the therion town. I haven't been looking for the others yet, sounds like I should.

Ophilia is my main & I gave her the mage second & with 200 spell points she's now a capable master